I didn’t pay attention in School and I regret that now. Please help me understand some aspects here. I read about Time being the fourth dimension but I am just having difficulty grasping this information.
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Time can be mathematically modeled as a fourth dimension, which helps to understand the linking of space and time in Einstein’s theories, but Einstein did not really argue that time is the fourth dimension per se. And time is not really like space: you can’t move in an arbitrary direction in time like you can in space, nor could you move in a given space direction without also moving through time (like you could do with two given spatial dimensions when you’re moving in a straight line.) In fact, in almost all respects, you’re ‘locked in’ to your passage through time, stuck moving through time in one direction forever. So it isn’t necessarily very useful to think of time as the fourth dimension, even if that is a mathematical model that we can use to model it.
If what you really want to understand is Einstein’s theories, though, the basic idea here is that space and time are linked together as one thing, spacetime. That is to say, movement through space can affect the passage of time from different perspectives. Very-fast moving objects have pass through time more slowly, as do objects in massive gravitational fields. Things that travel at the speed of light, like light, apparently ‘have no clock’, i.e., they have no passage of time within themselves.
I could try to explain with an example, if you’d like.
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